[openbeos] Re: Openness/Participation

First of all: you don't have to write a "brilliant piece of code".
That's nonsense and I think it was meant as a joke. :)

Ok. I was not intending to inflame anyone by copying that phrase from someone
else, and apologies if you felt I was berating the project.

All you need to do is send us a few patches.

The time I was referring to was early 2003, when I was unemployed after having
just completed my university studies, and looking for full time work.

However, I did not know then (and still don't) how to produce a patch file that
others can apply, (and usually struggled to manually apply other peoples
patches), due to lack of access to any document anywhere that clearly explained
how to produce a patch (I had not been taught it at university).

Back then, I also was unclear on how to know what aspects of work needed to be
done/ could be done/ were already being done by others.

The main other thing which I struggled to understand when I was trying to study
the source code was exactly where to "find" particular elements of the system,
i.e. it would be helpful if there was a document somewhere which clearly
explained the purpose of each directory in the source hierarchy, i.e. pointers
on where to go to look for particular things, and a brief statement of how the
compiling gathers this all together. Maybe such a guiding document now does
exist, but back then (2003) it did not.

I also found it took 6 hours to compile the code, under BeOS, on my machine, and
at the time it was only the text-based floppy-disk booting thing. Obviously,
things are much further advanced now, and I am grateful that there are also now
downloadable compiled versions that I can simply copy onto a partition and boot
those.

As I said, in my first posting a few days ago, I have mainly been observing
since then, and for some unknown reason happened to look at the mailing list
messages last Friday. For the next few weeks at least, I will probably also
disappear from posting here, since I am quite busy at my place of employment.
But after that, depending on my workload, I may see if I can spend some time on
weekends contributing in some way.